


How the Apocalypse of 2020 Happened - A Letter

by Sun_Spark



Category: 2020 - Fandom, Creepypasta - Fandom, Horror - Fandom
Genre: 2020, Dystopian Future, Letters, Other, Referenced racism, Zombie Apocalypse, how the apocalypse happened, referenced ableism, referenced rape, supernatural - referenced, the hunger games - referenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28380849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sun_Spark/pseuds/Sun_Spark
Summary: A Letter from a grandmother to her grandchild about how the zombie apocalypse of 2020 happened. Reflecting on the obsession of humanity with the apocalypse in many forms, with zombies, and with the destruction of society and the forming of a new society out of the ashes.
Relationships: Family - Relationship





	How the Apocalypse of 2020 Happened - A Letter

**Author's Note:**

> This was a writing assignment for college that I added to in order to form a Creepypasta-type story.

_Welp, I guess if you’re reading this I’m dead. Gosh, I always wanted to start a letter or recording like that. I suppose it’s true, that by now I am long dead, and I can only hope that they burned my body and left the ashes in the wind… Better to be scattered by the wind than dragged along whole in the dust by whatever it is that keeps those **things** moving. In any event, this should have been handed down to my grandchildren, if I have any. I don’t have any at the time I’m writing this, and I doubt my daughter wants to raise children in this hell. I didn’t. I never wanted kids at all, but then violence of the worst kinds in the chaos isn’t uncommon. There’s no law in the wilderness except fleeting human ethics. I digress. If you’re reading this you’re either a stranger who found it or my grandchild. _

_Hey kid. I bet you’re wondering how this all started. Your mom wasn’t around to see it, and I don’t know if she’ll be around to tell you, but I know I would want to know, and you probably do too._

_2020 was a hell year. We can just start there. We already had a pandemic devastating our population – those come about once every hundred years round about the 20s, just so you know – and we had idiots around every corner who couldn’t take the simplest precaution to slow the spread. Who knows, maybe the ones who died of sickness, slow and painful though it was, were the lucky ones. Then again, if they had just done those few simple things, this mutation probably would never have taken root. Wars were waging for my entire life, having started long before my birth, and the constant threat of terror attacks hung over everyone’s head. I always thought they were exaggerating, but the fear itself was real enough. In the midst of debating whether our nation would be led by a monster or a likely incompetent old man, my generation was flooding the streets, screaming for social change to end the bigotry we’d all lived under, written into the very bones of our society. It didn’t show any signs of getting better; no cure was found, terrorism continued, and the activists were labeled terrorists. And then, it happened. It wasn’t fast, but it took us all by surprise – One moment our liminal world trudged on in the monotony of the pandemic, and the next the Earth screamed and burned. We’re not sure even now what it was, but the scientists warned of a spreading mutation affecting dead tissue – they broadcasted those warnings, short and frantic as the airwaves cut out for the last time._

_Some folks prepared for it, doomsday bunkers and stockpiles of supplies they hoarded long before the fall. Some of them wanted it to happen, the sick fucks. Well, I hope they’re happy, if they lived long enough to enjoy the doomsday they wished for that is. But you see, even as the world has crumbled around me, as nature has taken over the once-bustling cities to make a haunting beauty, as our population has dwindled to only a few…I cannot blame them. The Zombie Plague overtook us long before this apocalypse fell._

_We were obsessed you see, most of us that is. Who am I kidding though? Even people like me who didn’t like Zombies still loved other forms of the apocalypse like Supernatural or the Hunger Games…you don’t even know what those are do you? Never mind. Back to the point. We were obsessed with the apocalypse in every form: Dystopian futures, tyrannical governments, eugenics and ethnic cleansing, planetary collisions and exploding suns, alien invasion, plague, monsters from the deep and devils come calling, on and on it goes. If you could dream up a way the world would end, it probably existed in one form of media or another. Some of them happened – genocides, wars, ethnic cleansing, plague, and more – all dotted along thousands of years of history, but none managed to be the end of the world. In theory, neither is this – We’re still alive, if only a few of us. So, just the end of the world as we know it, I suppose. Unlike all those other **real** times, this threat doesn’t show any signs of going away, it clings to every nook and cranny of the now wild and dangerous Earth like tar. This…nightmare, is far more like the fictions we reveled in rather than our history._

_Often the apocali we dreamed up and lost ourselves in came in the form of rotting flesh and reanimated corpses stumbling – or running – around to devour and infect us. The idea of them consumed us long before they did, before they became a reality. We consumed them in turn – we made them, imagined them, figured out how to kill them, and fantasized about fighting our way out and surviving. They consumed us and we consumed them in turn. It was just less literal back then._

_Why were we obsessed I can hear you asking – “What could be desirable about this hell?” Heh. You’re probably right, but you weren’t alive back then, in the **Before**. I told you 2020 was a hell year, but it went back farther than that. Racism, sexism, ableism, wars, disease, corruption, and always the screaming voices of protests to make it stop. We used to think ‘ We’ll fix it or we’ll let it burn. Let the whole damn thing burn to the ground. Whatever comes next can’t be worse.” We were wrong. We were also right I suppose, but we were mostly wrong. The world didn’t burn per se, but it did crumble. The old corrupt institutions fell, and it is difficult for bigotry to take hold on a large scale anymore, but it still plays out in a smaller scale. I’ve been turned away for being a woman with a child, even though she’s grown now. I know others who have been turned away or attacked for their skin or their identity. It’s not institutionalized anymore, but when we left those institutions behind we also left the thin fabric of society that held us all together. All the laws and all the morals that used to keep us safe, they don’t exist anymore. We used to think ‘Let the apocalypse come, we’ll rebuild something better from the ashes.’ I won’t live long enough to know if that’s true._

_Why the obsession with destruction? Why Zombies? It seemed the perfect end. The old humanity rising again to tear down society, the few survivors leaving that society behind and possibly starting anew. It was a future bathed in blood, gore, decay, and violence – Society would fall and those who would live would have to fight tooth and nail to make it. If they made it, there would not be a reset to the world, the Zombies would remain a constant malevolent reminder of what awaited them if they failed. Those stories always held the thinly veiled hope that in surviving together, bigotry would be unable to flourish in the new world. Foolish hope. Deadlier than these damn monstrosities, yet as necessary to survival as oxygen._

_Now admittedly some people just want to go out guns blazing and kill all the zombies they could – I’ll bet those nuts still exist in your time too kid – and that isn't’ surprising to me. Often the gory futures filled with zombies were directly tied to guns and violence in our media. Probably had something to do with the gun issues at the time – should we have them, should we not, how many, how restricted, etc. – and since many saw guns as integral to American identity, they made them integral to zombie apocali too. After all, what are zombies but a reflection of what we are, or at least what we can become? However, most looked at Zombies as a perfect vehicle to tear down the society we had. Granted the following reality was always hell, even in fiction, but at least it wasn’t the reality we were living in. “The world is doomed and so are we all, but hey! Zombies are cool.”_

_Maybe zombies were a commentary on how violent we could become. Maybe they were symbolic of tearing down their own society and rebuilding it. Maybe they were a warning of what we could become – more terrifying than anything else because at their core they were **human.** Whatever they were, they’re your reality now. It’s a reality we never should have wanted, a bloodsoaked one we should have feared. I don’t know what it says about us that so many of us still looked forward to it – to some form of true apocalypse-, even as what’s left burns around us._

_Whenever you are kid, I hope it’s better than it is now. Maybe society has reorganized and begun again, or maybe you’re all still nomadic and solitary, only keeping to small packs. I can happily say that for the most part the racism and ableism that plagued our media hasn’t become the norm in reality…but then ableism isn’t much of a consideration anymore…if you can’t run you can’t run. I hate that, but I can’t change it. Still, we tried to protect those we could. Sometimes people got left to die, but some of us tried not to leave anyone behind. Racially, however, those lines are gone except in the most bigoted and pigheaded cases. We can’t afford to be selective out here. Ironic isn’t it? My generation screamed for racism to end, and we fantasized about the end of the world, or burning it all down. I guess in a way we were right about that at least._

_Whatever new world you’re in or helping to build, don’t discriminate, okay? We dreamed about the end enough for the next few centuries, dream about a better beginning._

_Good luck kid.  
-Grandma T_


End file.
